CHAGA

The Waste of Valdeosso, 1618.

The Red Plague made blood seep from the eyes, the pores, the fingernails. In one year it took three thousand, four hundred and eleven souls.

Lazarus, the convent gravedigger, buried every one of them, and sold a few to the city's anatomists, by the ounce of silver. The Order of the Shroud buried him alive, in the common grave he had dug himself. For three days he knocked on the lid. Nobody came.

On the third day, something underneath him knocked back. In the same rhythm.

CHAGA is a dark incremental game in pixel art. Squeeze the Heart, raise the dead, and dig an upside-down cathedral thirteen layers into the earth, all the way down to the eyelid of a buried God.

Squeeze the Heart

Every click on the Heart gushes Blood. Your old neighbours from the common grave stand up and open their wrists over it every four seconds, without complaint. Blind Copyists write Heresy on skin. Goat-masked Harvesters cut down the hanged of the Grove and thresh their bones. And now and then the Order sends a procession of flagellants to pray at the edge of your pit. It would be a shame to waste them.

Die. Molt. Come back worse.

In the upside-down Chapel there is a confessional that breathes. Confessing kills Lazarus: his old skin falls onto the pile, and he crawls back out through his own corpse's mouth, marked with new Stigmata. Forty of them, across 24 tiers, and a portrait of Lazarus that grows a little holier and a little stranger with every death.

Deeper

• An Anatomical Theatre where dissections catalogue 40 organs in jars.
• A Nest where the Brood grows through five stages. It is the only thing down there that seems to like you.
• A map made of human skin: 22 parishes to corrupt with the Gospel of the Wound.
• The Slaughterhouse of Saint Ossery, where the fat of saints is rendered into Ichor and relics.
• A Choir of witches, wailers, immolated men and flies against three Seals that Heaven sewed over the wound.
• A Crypt where the stars live inside the flesh and the picture flickers like a worn-out tape.

Three endings

Features

• 13 layers, 12 kinds of workers, 5 sleepless uniques, 3 Seals to break and 3 endings.
• An Archive full of autopsies, letters from the Inquisition, confessions, hymns, parish chronicles, VHS tapes from the future and a bestiary.
• 40 achievements, and cosmetics for the Heart, the palette, the cursor, the frame and Lazarus's title.
• Full English and Brazilian Portuguese.
• Accessibility: gore level, black blood, a colour-blind palette, screen shake and flash toggles, 2× reading text and hold-to-click.

About this demo

The browser demo goes from the plague cemetery down to the Chapel of the Molt. The full game continues for eight more layers below it. 

Content warning

18+. Blood, mutilation, body horror and religious horror. All saints, orders and places are fictional. No sexual content.